


Sealskin

by SecondStarOnTheLeft



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe - Selkies, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-26
Updated: 2012-11-26
Packaged: 2017-11-19 14:03:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/574056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SecondStarOnTheLeft/pseuds/SecondStarOnTheLeft
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The sea washed all manner of things into the harbour at Oldtown, but Willas had never expected to see something like this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sealskin

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the prompt:
> 
> Sansa/Willas - Mermaid!Sansa falls in love with Willas Tyrell. Angst ensues.
> 
> So the prompt said mermaid and somehow that translated to selkie in my head and then it was Willas who fell in love with Sansa. Oops. I'm so sorry for that, OP, but here you go. Hope you enjoy (I went with the basic selkie wife tale so oops if this isn't at all what you were looking for, genuinely sorry)

The sea washed all manner of things into the harbour at Oldtown, but Willas had never expected to see something like this.

“It’s a girl!” Humfrey exclaimed, tossing aside the hide that had hidden what they’d all thought to be a corpse. “By gods, she’s _alive!”_  

Willas waited for his uncle to come back up, carrying the girl in his arms.

“Bit odd,” Humfrey said quietly, “but her fingers, Willas - look at her fingers.”

Willas looked.

They were webbed.

He remembered stories heard while sitting at his mother’s feet, stories of sirens and mermaids.

Stories of selkies.

“I think we’d better bring the sealskin,” he said, waving for one of their guards to go down and fetch it. “And we’d better get her back to the High Tower as soon as possible."

 

* * *

 

Maesters and archmaesters and Malora and the Old Man all poked and prodded and peered at the girl from the sea with fire in her hair, the girl who slept on but had eyes the colour of the sky when the maesters peeled back her eyelids to look at them.

Her skin, in the right light, had the queerest green cast to it, almost too faint to notice, but otherwise she was like a pearl, pale and lovely and softly luminous.

Willas sat in her room longer than anyone, but he did not dare touch her. He thought he may have been the only person in the High Tower and the Citadel both who hadn't by now, by the time she stretched and arched her slender back and opened those noonday-sky eyes.

"What...?" she gasped, bolting upright in the bed and casting about frantically, pawing at the air and beginning to cry.

"You're safe here," he said, levering himself to his feet (damned leg) and moving slowly towards the bed. "We shan't hurt you, I promise."

She looked him up and down, lingering on his cane for a worryingly long moment, and then met his eyes.

"Fisherman?" she queried, voice as harsh as anything he'd ever heard (bone cracking-leather snapping-flesh twisting).

"No," he said, surprised. "I raise horses."

It was a strange answer, but it seemed to please her - her frown melted, and if she didn't smile, well, at least she didn't seem to be panicking anymore.

"Nets?" she asked, holding up the bedsheet curiously.

"Oh, no," he assured her. "For warmth - it gets cold here."

He imagined it would be cold underwater, but mayhaps you didn't notice if you were there all of the time. He assumed it would be different to feeling your bathwater cool.

She was tugging at the nightgown - Malora's, and grossly too wide in the shoulders (gaping at the neck, he noticed, before he looked away sharply) - and frowning.

"It's scratchy," she said, and he ducked out the door when she began to pull it over her head.

"Grandfather!" he shouted. "She's woken up!"

 

* * *

 

Her name was Sansa, and her family...

"Dead," she said, tears brimming in her anger-dark eyes. "Golden men with strong nets and sharp hooks took them, my brothers and sister and my parents. All gone."

"Why...?" he asked, and even as he said it he knew.

"Lamp oil and boots," she said. "Golden men and iron men hunt us. Do paper men hunt my people?"

Paper men was what she'd taken to calling the Hightowers - Humfrey had found it amusing, had told her Willas was a rose man which had made Willas blush and Sansa ask what roses were.

Willas had brought her roses the following morning, sneaking them from Lady Rhea's garden while she was dining with Grandfather. She despised anyone going into her gardens, but it was the only place in Oldtown where Willas knew he could find roses that had a chance of measuring up to what he could find at home.

 

* * *

 

"You do not belong here," she said to him one day a week after they found her. "You are not of the sea."

"No," he agreed, "I come from much further inland - my home is a place called Highgarden. It is very beautiful there."

"Why then are you here?" she asked, poking at her soup with curious eyes. "You are not a prisoner, like me?"

"You're no prisoner!" he exclaimed, horrified. "Nor am I - I injured my leg several moons ago-"

"It is not healed?" she asked, eyeing it curiously. "A bad hurt, then?"

"Very," he said, rolling up the leg of his breeches to show her the livid scarring on his calf but not daring to show her his knee. "I was riding in a tourney - do you know what a tourney is?"

She shook her head, and he spent the rest of the day telling her about tourneys and jousting and knights.

 

* * *

 

"The maesters'll cut her to pieces to find out what makes her go," Baelor said, lifting Sansa up into the saddle and tucking her hair back under her hood. "They can't cut her apart if she's not here."

"I'll keep her safe," Willas promised, biting back a curse as he pulled the straps around his knee tight. "I swear it, Baelor, I do."

The Old Man clapped him on the back and smiled grimly.

"Ride hard, lad," he boomed as quietly as he was able. "Ride as hard as she can handle it, and get her away from the maesters."

Baelor led Sansa and her horse out of the stable, but the Old Man caught Willas' wrist before he could follow them.

"If we get her skin back, she'll swim," he said, something Willas refused to acknowledge in his eyes. "It's only right that we look for her skin, lad."

Willas nodded once, sharply, but he was sixteen and in love and didn't want to listen to his grandfather's warning.

 

* * *

 

She fit into his life in Highgarden so seamlessly it only made sense that he marry her - Grandmother created an elaborate story that painted Sansa as a foreign noblewoman, much like Doran Martell's Norvoshi wife, and nobody thought to question the fine webs of skin between the third and fourth fingers of her left hand and the second and third of her right hand.

Margaery took to her more than anyone, giggling behind her hand with Sansa when they sat together in the window seat in Willas' solar at night, seven years old and as fascinated by the beautiful shimmer of Sansa's hair as Willas was himself. 

Mother worried, Willas knew that, she read the letters Grandfather and Baelor sent about the search for Sansa's skin in the Citadel, knew what would happen if ever it was found, but Willas didn't care. He  _refused_ to care, because Sansa smiled at him like that and knelt across his lap and pressed his hands to her stomach and kissed him.

He didn't care. He wouldn't care, not when he loved her so much he thought he'd burst with it. Not when she was carrying his child, his son, when she was so gloriously happy here with him that he couldn't imagine her wanting to go back to the sea even if the maesters did release her skin.

 

* * *

 

"They're swimming," Sansa said, barely above a murmur as they lay side by side in bed, hands pressed to the massive swell of her stomach, feeling the babe (or babes, Sansa was convinced that she was having twins) tumble and twist under her skin. "That's from my side of the family."

"Mm," he sighed, spreading his fingers wide to touch as much of her as he could at once. She was so beautiful, slender limbs and wild flaming hair and huge periwinkle eyes and round, round belly, round with his child, and he could only manage to smile.

He automatically shifted his fingers to accomodate her webs when she took his hands, and then he kissed her.

 

* * *

 

Life was so exquisitely lovely that Willas forgot about Sansa's sealskin, forgot about everything. There was only Sansa and Leyton and Eddara (named for her father) and Daved and Naerys (she liked that story best, Queen Naerys and Aemon the Dragonknight). Even Mother stopped worrying, stopped trying to make him prepare for the bad news that was near inevitable at the start, when it seemed likely that Grandfather and Baelor and Humfrey would find Sansa's skin, but as the years passed that became less and less likely, less probable, less  _possible._

* * *

"Are you happy?" he asked her as they rode for Oldtown, sun shattering gold and copper and and flame in her hair. Leyton was riding along on his pony at Willas' side, Naerys happily clapping from her seat on the front of Willas' saddle, Dara beside Sansa and Daved in front of her, and all four of them chattering loud and bright. 

"Very," Sansa promised him, wrapping one arm around Daved and holding the reins in that hand so she could reach out to touch his face. "I never imagined I could be so happy."

"That is all I can ask," he said, turning to kiss her fingertips. "I cannot ask for more."

 

* * *

 

Part of their reason for visiting Oldtown was to bring Daved to the Citadel, to the maesters, to see if there was anything to be done about his mirror-reading. 

Willas, for the first time in years, felt nervous about losing Sansa, feared that her skin might be found, but she never seemed to have any urge run across the hall and tear apart one of the dozens of storerooms that made up a good two-thirds of the Citadel.

But Willas never factored Leyton and Naerys' inherent nosiness into his worries, his fears, never thought to fear what his other children would be doing while he and Sansa sat with Daved and two maesters in a stuffy reading room off the library.

Never thought to wonder what it was Leyton wished to show Sansa when he took her by the hand just before they were about to leave and pulled her back into the warren of corridors and rooms.

He didn't worry.

Not until Sansa came sprinting out into the sunshine with a bundle in her arms, a bundle that he recognised in a distant sort of way, and she was off, sprinting and sprinting for the harbour, and he swung up onto Gardener's back to chase her, to herd her back.

"Sansa, please!" he begged, stumbling to the ground and catching hold of her shoulders. "Please, love, don't-"

"I must," she wept, touching his face as she had while they rode not three days before. "You knew that this could come, love, I must go-"

"But you cannot come home to me if you go now," he said, "you cannot be with the children, you will never see them married, never see our grandchildren, Sansa, I am  _begging_ you, don't go. Don't leave me."

She leaned up on her toes and kissed him, and when she pulled away there were tears on her cheeks.

"I cannot stay," she whispered, and then she ducked around him and was gone, the flame of her hair visible all the way down the street to the harbour and then, gone.

He stood and stared at the spot where she had disappeared into the water until Grandfather came for him.

Willas was twenty-four, with four children less than seven years old, and a widower in all the ways that mattered.

 

* * *

 

He never visited Oldtown again.


End file.
